First, they came for the phony blog commenters. How long before they lock up every satirist in America?

That’s how Harvey Silverglate sees that recent flap at Rutgers. The 69-year-old Boston attorney is a co-founder of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which fights censorship on campuses across America. Rutgers frequently comes under fire from FIRE, and the university’s ham-handed handling of a recent piece of satirical journalism was no exception.

The flap began when the campus satirical publication, the Medium, ran a parody of the work of a columnist at the Rutgers Targum. The columnist, Aaron Marcus, writes frequently on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The editors of the Medium,which publishes weekly, thought it would be fun to parody his column. They did so by creating a fake version in which the fake author says various good things about Hitler, such as that he created the Volkswagen.

At that point, Marcus might have considered that adage about people who live in glass houses. Instead, he started throwing stones. He filed a bias complaint with the university, charging that the Medium editors had made it appear he endorses anti-Semitism.

At that point, the proper response of the adults in the administration should have been to take the kid aside and tell him to sit down and watch “Saturday Night Live.” If satire were a crime, the producers would be in prison.

Instead, the university began an investigation of the Medium. University President Richard McCormick piled on, stating that even though the student media have First Amendment rights, “No individual student should be subject to such a vicious, provocative and hurtful piece.”

When I ran that quote by Silverglate, he said McCormick’s reaction is typical.

“When you hear this sort of thing, it’s always accompanied by a line like, ‘Of course, students have free speech and academic freedom,’ followed by a ‘but,’ ” he said. “When you see the word ‘but,’ you should duck, because the censors are right behind the ‘but.’ ”

Worse, said Silverglate, this line of attack on free speech is escaping the confines of the campus. All over the country, prosecutors are going after internet users under the guise of protecting people from parody.

As usual, Jersey leads the way. In 2009, I wrote about how the Passaic County Sheriff’s Office initiated a prosecution of a guy from West Milford who created an obviously fake screen name to lampoon a political opponent. The charge was identity theft, but it was thrown out of court by a municipal judge.

Recently, we saw the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office pull a similar stunt. After an Essex County woman set up a fake Facebook page saying a bunch of preposterous things about her ex-boyfriend, a Parsippany police officer, she was hit with criminal charges. Again, the charge was identity theft.

This time, the judge went along with that. The woman could have faced prison time if not admitted into a pretrial intervention program.

But the identity-theft statute was clearly intended to target consumer fraud. State Sen. Joe Vitale, a Democrat from Woodbridge, said legislators never intended to outlaw internet satires.

“That discussion never even took place,” said Vitale. “The intention was to protect consumers.”

But if the government is going to get involved in policing the postings of every scorned lover on the internet, the p.c. police are going to be pretty busy. That’s where this country’s heading, Silverglate said. In the 1998 book “The Shadow University” that he co-authored, “We predicted that unless speech were freed up on college campuses, within 20 years, speech would begin to be restricted in the general society at large,” he said. “Now, we’re seeing these crazy cases creep out into the real world.”

Indeed, we are. And we’d better start building more jail cells. (Check here for one of thousands of similar cases.) I learned that when I looked up the defense lawyer in that Morris County case on the internet. The Wikipedia entry for Richard Roberts of Newark said he was 82 years old. But when I got him on the phone, Richard Roberts told me he’s really “just this side of 70.”

“My ex-wife keeps changing it on me,” said Roberts.

I hope she doesn’t live in Morris County. She’d be off to the hoosegow in a heartbeat.